Wednesday, August 06, 2014

Get Reading presents a production of Charles Vance's Wuthering Heights at South Hill Park in Bracknell:

Cries of 'Heathcliffe! Heathcliffe!' (sic) will be ringing through South Hill Park this week.
The Studio Theatre Company is performing a deliciously dark version of Emily Brontë's 1847 novel Wuthering Heights.
"The story is incredibly dark," says Luke Burton, director of the Studio Theatre Company who plays Hindley Earnshaw in the show.
"You have these people, sort of out in the middle of nowhere and Catherine is actually not particularly nice, and neither is Heathcliff.
"That's the funny thing, you kind of like this couple but you don't know why you do because they're not very nice at all." (...)
For Luke, stepping into the shoes of Catherine's brother Hindley has been a welcome change from the roles he usually plays.
"He is a nasty piece of work," says Luke. "I don't often get to play nasty characters, I'm usually the funny ones so it's really good to get my teeth into a character like this." (...)
"Every now and then I like to do a well-known piece," he explains. "Although everyone knows Wuthering Heights from the novel or film versions it's not a stage production that's been done a lot, certainly not around these areas.
"It's been adapted by Charles Vance and I had not come across it until our director Jess Hadleigh suggested it.
"It's a piece which works well in the Studio Theatre."
"It's all done via flashbacks and it starts with a character who comes in a looks back on the last 20 years to how they got where they are now," says Luke.
"It flits between places and times so we don't have a fixed set. We have to adapt the space constantly going from one house to another or from one time to 20 years later."(Caroline Cook)

So my shamefully limited and biased experience of English holiday destinations left me pretty sceptical before my first trip to the Yorkshire Dales. It didn't help that all I knew about Yorkshire I learnt from Wuthering Heights, mid-afternoon crime dramas, and smug southern jokes. However, it became clear very quickly - even to someone who didn't know their moors from their dales - that Yorkshire's reputation as poetic muse actually made quite a lot of sense. Unlike my Essex beach, a poor relation to my childhood holidays in Ireland, the Dales were distinctly different - and distinctly English. (Ciara O'Connor)

The author Charlie Fletcher in The Guardian gives reasons why we need stories:

World ownership
Following on from point two: do the creative work in your own head and you are taking ownership of the stories. They become part of the fabric of who you are. I – like you – am Spartacus. But I'm also Scout Finch and Davie Balfour and Phillip Marlowe and Jane Eyre and David Copperfield and Bilbo Baggins and – on my best days, Granny Weatherwax or Sam Vimes.

In conjunction with Peninsula Players Theatre’s current production of the Charles Ludlam farce “The Mystery of Irma Vep — A Penny Dreadful,” Players will host speaker Gary Jones for a pre-show seminar at 6:30 p.m. Aug. 8. Tickets to the performance are available; admission to the seminar is free. The Drama Desk- and Obie Award-winning comedy is a mash-up of Victorian gothic romances and Universal monster movies. Jones will speak about the influences of classic gothic romances such as “Rebecca,” "Wuthering Heights” and “Dracula” on Ludlam’s fast-paced piece.

The Stage talks about the boom of music theatre in China and remembers the fact that,

In March this year, three original Chinese musicals – including a version of Jane Eyre – were premiered in Shanghai. (Michael Quinn)

Karl van den Broeck in De Redactie (Belgium) remembers one of this favourite holiday trips:

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Weekly Quote

Villette is one blaze, one broad illumination; the whole world seems abroad; moonlight and heaven are banished: the town, by her own flambeaux, beholds her own splendour—gay dresses, grand equipages, fine horses and gallant riders throng the bright streets. I see even scores of masks. It is a strange scene, stranger than dreams.
~ Villette (ch. XXXVIII) by Charlotte Brontë